It seems there will be no end to the ravaging of great collections by museum boards without any other hope in sight. Just as the financial distress with the Barnes yanked this famous collection from its roots in Merion, PA, to a pretentiously zen warehouse in Philadelphia in 2012, so too does impending financial doom threaten to tear apart Washington’s Corcoran Gallery [...]

The price tag on conservation for a major work of art is rather steep. The funding of such a project allows a global corporation such as the Bank of America to exhibit its benevolent side to the public. Bank of America’s website for its Merrill Lynch Global Art Conservation Project boasts that it has provided grant funding for “museums in 25 countries for [...]

Patrons of restoration and expansion projects at museums and churches are now taking full advantage of the benefits of sponsorship, turning important cultural and religious centers into commercial billboards for over-sized advertisements. And the benefits are large. Hewlett Packard’s campaign on temporary construction walls at the London National Gallery occurred in 2004, when attendance levels were at 5 million for the year, up over 13% from [...]

Quite unexpectedly, the hitherto carefully maintained defences of the National Gallery’s picture cleaning policies are in disarray. Their hollowness has been painfully exposed by glaring disparities of colour and tonality between four paintings assembled for the current Titian exhibition.

The four pictures, commissioned from Titian by the Duke of Ferrara for his study or “Camerino” between 1518 and 1524, have, for first time [...]

Masaccio was the first truly Renaissance artist who, in his short lifetime of 26 years of which perhaps only five were as an independent master, managed to revolutionize Western painting. He was born in 1401 and in honor of his 600th anniversary, a few relatively modest events are being planned for his birthplace of San Giovanni Valdarno, which does not possess a single [...]

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